Inputting Mathematical Expressions at Runtime in C

Executive Summary

The problem of inputting a mathematical expression at runtime in C is generally considered very difficult. The general approach to solve the problem is to include specialized parser packages as header files. It appears that such packages are available only for advanced versions of C like C++ or C#. In this paper, the authors consider a very elementary solution to the problem which does not make use of external packages and uses only the basic concepts of the C programming environment. It also does not require the in-line implementation of the extremely difficult task of parsing a mathematical expression. This approach is accessible to beginning programmers also.